Poorly, poor man, he lived, poorly, poor man he died.[1] for he never attained to any higher preferment than that of being “one of the Clerks of Trinity College.” But it may be doubted whether any of those who partook more largely of the endowment of that noble establishment, enjoyed so large a portion of real happiness. We find him in the sixty-third year of his age, and the fortieth of his marriage, not rich, not what the world calls fortunate, but a contented, cheerful old man; even though “Time had done to him this wrong” that it had half deprived him of his highest gratification, for he had become so deaf that he could not hear his own lute. When Homer says of his own blind bard that the Muse gave him good and evil, depriving him of his eyes, but giving him the gift of song, we understand the compensation; _Τὸν πέρι Μοῦσ᾽ ἐφίλησε, δίδου δ᾽ ἀγαθόν τε κακόν τε, Ὀφθαλμῶν μὲν ἄμερσε, δίδου δ᾽ ἡδεῖαν ἀοιδήν·_ but what can compensate a musician for the loss of hearing! There is no inward ear to be the bliss of solitude. He could not like Pythagoras _ἀῤῥήτῳ τινὶ καὶ δυσεπινοήτῳ θειότητι χρώμενος_, by an effort of ineffable and hardly conceivable divinity retire into the depths of his own being, and there listen to that heavenly harmony of the spheres which to him alone of all the human race was made audible; _ἑαυτῷ γὰρ μόνῳ τῶν ἐπὶ γῆς ἀπάντων συνετὰ καὶ ἐπήκοα τὰ κοσμικὰ φθέγματα ἐνόμιζεν ἀπ᾽ αὐτῆς τῆς φυσικῆς πηγῆς καὶ ῥίζῆς._[2] Master Mace had no such supernatural faculty, and no such opinion of himself. But the happy old man devises a means of overcoming to a certain degree his defect by inventing what he called a Dyphone, or Double Lute of fifty strings, a representation of which is given in his book, as “the one only instrument in being of that kind, then lately invented by himself, and made with his own hands in the year 1672.” [Footnote 1: PHINEAS FLETCHER.] [Footnote 2: IAMBLICHI Liber de Pythagoricâ, Vitâ c. xv.]